Resuming Play: What Are Your Hobbies?

I often find myself in precarious positions. Not socially or emotionally precarious positions, per se — although those do come along, too — but physically precarious positions. I’ll be unloading the dishwasher when I find my body forming more of a choreographed grand plié than a squat. Then there are the times I pirouette into the bathroom, knuckles involuntarily slamming into the towel rack. The thing is, I miss dance. I stopped ballet when I was thirteen. The rigidity and intensity wore on my hormonal soul, and I longed to escape the escalating pressures imposed by the studio environment.

But there was a part of the equation I got fundamentally wrong. It wasn’t so much that my body grew tired of the movements, it was more a matter of my inability to cope with my peers. At the time, I had mistakenly muddled those two components and in doing so convinced myself that ballet was something my body would never crave again.

Now I am 18. The past four months have lent themselves to major changes, one of which includes moving away to college in another country. In my daily interactions with new people I’ve become hyperaware to the repeated conversations about “things-I-used-to-do-then-stopped-but-want-to-resume.” X really would like to take up watercoloring again; Y just wishes he had more fucking time to skate.

There’s something about humans that makes us constantly want to shed the skins of our past — until we don’t. Suddenly, the fear of potentially losing touch with certain places and memories wears on the psyche, creating an urgency for resuming the hobbies and pastimes that brought us some rush or pleasure in an entirely different headspace. We then go on to blame our failure to resume these hobbies and pastimes on the ever-present menace: time.

But life goes on, and it’s arguably nothing more than a chess game of priority. A bunch of little humans out there, readjusting (or not) their pawns in both satisfactory and unsatisfactory layouts. Simply put, there is time if you make it, and there isn’t if you don’t. We are creatures of habit, and if we miss doing something that once gave us pleasure then we should prioritize rediscovering that something. Maybe it’s painting, or dancing, or hiking, or reading. There’s a certain comfort in familiar things, and suppressing such tendencies to revert to earlier modes seems, well, a waste of that ever-present menace: Time.

*Googles adult ballet classes.*

Written by Emma Hager

Image on the left shot by Annabel Mehran for Purple Magazine, Image on the right shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE magazine, 1936.